Design and Architecture Considerations

This document lists and details five prerequisite items that take some time to configure. Understand these networking and security concepts up front, so that your Cisco Spark Hybrid Services deployment goes smoothly.

This design guide provides an overview of Cisco Spark Hybrid Services design and deployment for enterprises. It contains an architecture overview that introduces the components involved, a deeper technical discussion of the architecture covering the various connectors, how they function, the components involved, and best practices in deployment of the connectors.

After you set up any Cisco Spark Hybrid Services, you and other administrators in your organization may want to receive email notifications about the service status, alarms, software upgrades, and so on.

You complete a one-time deployment of each hybrid service. For Expressway-based hybrid services, when you register your environment to the cloud, a software connector is installed automatically on your equipment. For others, like directory and media, you deploy the software on a supported Windows or VM environment. The software (connectors, media nodes, directory connector) communicates securely with our service in the cloud.

The Directory Connector automatically synchronizes Microsoft Active Directory users with Cisco Spark (creating, updating, deleting) so that user account information is always current in the cloud. The Active Directory remains the single source for all user account information that is mirrored in Cisco Spark.

Simplify your day-to-day user administration and management tasks.

Provide accurate and up-to-date directory content for all Cisco Spark users when they click to call, message, or to add people to meetings.

From a calendar client, in the field where meeting location is normally added, users can:

Add @spark to automatically create a Cisco Spark space and corresponding join link for the space. This information is shared with all meeting invitees for before, during, and after-meeting information and document sharing.

Add @webex or their Personal Room URL to automatically share the host's WebEx Personal Room and join information in the invitation.

From Outlook, people can share their out-of-office status in Cisco Spark. As soon as someone sets an automatic reply and date range, others can see the status in Cisco Spark in these locations:

Cisco Hybrid Media Service dynamically finds the optimal mix of on-premises and cloud conferencing resources. On-premises conferences stay on premises when there are enough local resources. When local resources are exhausted, conferences then expand to the cloud.

Cisco Hybrid Media Service:

Improves quality and reduces latency by allowing you to keep your calls on-premises.

Extends your calls transparently to the cloud when on-premises resources have reached their limit.

Allows you to manage your Hybrid Media Nodes from the cloud.

Allows you to optimize resources and scale capacity, as needed.

Combines the features of cloud and on-premises conferencing in one seamless user experience.

Eliminates capacity concerns, because the cloud is always available when more resources are needed.

From day one, data security has been the primary focus in designing the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. The cornerstone of this security is end-to-end content encryption, enabled by Cisco Spark clients interacting with the Key Management Service (KMS). The KMS is responsible for creating and managing the cryptographic keys that clients use to dynamically encrypt and decrypt messages and files.

By default, all Cisco Collaboration Cloud customers get end-to-end encryption with dynamic keys stored in the cloud KMS, Cisco's security realm. Hybrid Data Security moves the KMS and other security-related functions to your enterprise data center, so nobody but you holds the keys to your encrypted content.

Hybrid Context Service

Hybrid Context Service links your Context Service deployment with Cisco Collaboration Cloud. You can administer simple tasks to your Context Service deployment using https://admin.ciscospark.com.

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